Black Hills (46 page)

Pity the poor Jews in Germany, thinks Paha Sapa, unless their long-quiet god with a capital G proves an equal to the
Wakinyan
Thunder Beings. Despite his reading and discussions with Doane Robinson—and even with the poor Jesuits in Deadwood—on the subject of Judaism, Paha Sapa has no real idea if the Jews believe in their god possessing them with the full
berserker
killing spirit. But he suspects that Hitler and his group know the joys, terror, and reflected power of that possession by fierce gods all too well.

Paha Sapa sighs. He has trouble sleeping on trains and is very tired after three days and nights sitting up on a series of hard wicker seats. He’s glad when the conductor comes through the cars announcing that the next stop will be Grand Central Terminal and the end of the line.

P
AHA
S
APA HAULS HIS BAG
the few blocks to the cheap hotel on 42nd Street that Whiskey Art Johnson told him about. The place has his reservation, but the room won’t be ready until afternoon, so Paha Sapa takes an apple out of his bag, stores the bag with the clerk, and begins walking south along Park Avenue.

“Her apartment cooperative is only three blocks south of here, at Seventy-one Park Avenue. Will you stop?”

No. We agreed. The appointment is not until four p.m.

“But you’ll be going right by her place….”

I’ll come back at four. I have things and people of my own to see before then.

“But she might be home
now!
It’s almost certain she is. She never goes out anymore, according to Mrs. Elmer. We could just stop, ask the doorman…”

No.

“What if we went the other way, then, up to One Twenty-two East Sixty-sixth Street, to the Cosmopolitan Club, where she used to…”

Silence!

The last is not a request but an absolute command. Paha Sapa has discovered that he can send the ghost back to his sightless, soundless hole any time he chooses.

If his hotel room had been available, Paha Sapa might have considered napping for an hour or two after his days sitting up on the train, rarely even dozing through the nights across the prairie and grain fields of the Midwest, then the dark wooded hills and tunnels of Pennsylvania and beyond, but he realizes a good, bracing walk is better. And it is a good walk.

He does glance at the apartment building at 71 Park Avenue, only three blocks south of his hotel, but does not linger. As such places in a city go, it is an attractive enough building. He feels his own anxiety over the imminent interview—it took almost two years to arrange—and can’t even imagine the anxiety of his resident spirit. In truth, he doesn’t want to know.

Paha Sapa smiles as he walks briskly down Park Avenue. He thought he was ready for New York City; he was wrong. The buildings, the myriad and maze of streets, the blocking of the early-morning sun, the countless automobiles and ice and delivery wagons, the streetcars and taxis, the constant flow of pedestrians. It’s been almost forty years since he was in a city of any real size—Chicago during the 1893 Exposition—and the downtown of that Black City was nothing compared to any part of this metropolis. The effect on the aging and weary Natural Free Human Being—which translates as “rube” or “bumpkin” here—from the Dust Bowl western state is immediate and overwhelming.

At first the scale and pace of everything here are oddly exhilarating, making Paha Sapa almost dizzy on top of his fatigue,
but within ten minutes all that scale and pace has become like a heavy pressure on every part of his body. (He thinks of Big Bill Slovak’s caisson stories.) Everywhere else he’s ever been, he’s felt like a person—whether anyone knows his true name or not—but here he’s just one of millions, and a pathetic one at that: a very thin and weary-looking Indian with long braids still black but dark circles under his eyes and wrinkles on his face. He catches sight of his quickly marching reflection in shop and restaurant windows—another pressure that he’s not used to, this seeing himself constantly—and notes how ill-fitting and out of style his black suit and clumsily knotted dark tie and soft cap are. His rarely worn and highly polished dress shoes squeak with every step and are killing his feet. Smiling ruefully, Paha Sapa realizes that he’s dressed for this trip in his going-to-funeral clothes, and that fact becomes more obvious in every reflective surface he passes. He imagines that he smells of sweat, cigar smoke from the train, and mothballs. Paha Sapa does not own a topcoat to go with this baggy old suit, and he has been cold since the train left Rapid City…. Spring is coming late this year on the plains and in the heartland.

Even though the sunny morning here in New York City is warming toward the promised low sixties he read about in the newspaper, he wishes he’d worn the thick leather jacket that Robert had left with him in 1917 and that he’s worn everywhere except at work for the sixteen autumns, winters, and springs since. That and his comfortable work boots.

He strides down the broad Park Avenue from 42nd Street to Union Square and then follows Fourth Avenue southeast into the Bowery. He’s soon south of all the numbered streets and passing through Little Italy, past Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, past Hester Street, past Delancey and toward Canal Street, striding through all the teeming and seething immigrant neighborhoods that fed its second generation of laborers and builders to the rest of America. He muses that if he had been born American, rather than Indian, his parents might have lived in these tenements, in these neighborhoods, after coming in through Castle Garden from heaven knows where across the sea. (Doane Robinson once told Paha Sapa that before 1855 there was no processing point in America for immigrants. People moving here simply made a
declaration—when they bothered to—to customs officials on the steamships or sailing ships and went on about their business in their new country. Robinson described how at Castle Garden, on an island off the southwest tip of Manhattan—also called Castle Clinton—the state of New York, not the federal government, had processed would-be immigrants until it closed in 1890. The government had taken over then and dealt with the immigration flow at a temporary center on a barge until Ellis Island opened for business in 1900. Since 1924, Doane told him, most would-be immigrants were once again being processed aboard the ships, with Ellis Island being the destination only for those who required hearings or some sort of physical quarantine.)

For some reason, Paha Sapa wishes he had time enough in New York City to visit all of these sites, even though immigration has nothing to do with him. Then he remembers the dead
wasichu
bluecoat soldiers littering the rolling hills above the Greasy Grass, their white and mutilated bodies so shocking against the green and brown grass. The majority of those dead men, he learned in his year as scout with Crook’s cavalry out of Fort Robinson, were Irish and German and other immigrants fresh off the boat. The serious recession of 1876 had left signing up with the army an attractive alternative to starving in these very tenement neighborhoods Paha Sapa is walking through. Half of the micks and krauts in Custer’s command, Curly told him in his
winkte
broken Lakota and even more broken English, hadn’t understood their sergeants’ and officers’ commands.

There is no comment on this from the ghost sulking inside him.

The distance from Grand Central Terminal to the Brooklyn Bridge is not that long—less than four miles is Paha Sapa’s guess—and walking between such high buildings, from shadow to sun and then back to shade again at each intersection, crossing to the west side of the street to get out of the chilly shadow when the buildings are lower, reminds him of canyons he has hiked in Colorado, Utah, Montana, and, to a much lesser extent, in his own Black Hills. But in Paha Sapa’s part of the West there are only a few canyons, such as the one the
wasichus
are now calling Spearfish Canyon, deep enough or steep enough to give this echoing, stark-sunlight and then sudden-shade lower-Bowery effect.

The wind has a nip to it despite the growing warmth of the day. Usually Paha Sapa ignores high and low temperatures, but this year the cold has bothered him and this New York chill makes him wish again for a topcoat or Robert’s leather motorcycle jacket. The streets are getting too narrow ahead, and he turns right and walks to the southwest along Canal Street back toward Broadway, turning left again onto Centre Street.

He can see City Hall Park ahead and… suddenly… he has arrived.

The Brooklyn Bridge stretches above low buildings and arches out over the East River. The rising sun is still low enough that the two towers and the elevated, arching roadway throw long shadows toward Manhattan, the closer tower—the so-called New York tower—shading the narrow waterfront streets and old warehouses on either side of the broad approach.

“This is what you came for?”

—
Yes. You and your wife were in New York the winter before you died. Weren’t the towers finished then?

“The Brooklyn tower was. The New York tower wasn’t quite finished when we left in February. Both of them were a mass of derricks and scaffolds, but grand even so. There were no cables strung yet…. Look at that roadway! Look at those suspension cables! We could never have imagined that the finished bridge would look so grand!”

Paha Sapa says nothing to this. It does look grand. He’s seen photographs of the bridge, but nothing could have quite prepared him for the reality. Even on this island of new architectural giants, the Brooklyn Bridge—even seen from the cluttered approach vistas here on the Manhattan side—has a grandeur and power all its own.

Paha Sapa could—but chooses not to—tell his resident ghost about the endless ten-hour workdays down in the dangerous blackness and dust and smoke of the Holy Terror Mine in Keystone and about his mentor Tarkulich “Big Bill” Slovak’s constant talk, in that booming whatever-it-was Eastern European accent, the giant’s shouts somehow carrying over the rattling of steam drills and the pounding of sledgehammers and the rusty screech and squeal and rumble of the mine carts squeezing past them in the midnight-dark chaos, and about his—Big Bill’s—part in building the Brooklyn Bridge.

Having left the “Old Country” just a few steps ahead of the police after killing another teenager in a fight in some city that sounded to Paha Sapa as if it had no vowels at all in its name, in May of 1870, the 17-year-old Big Bill Slovak had arrived in New York and immediately hired on as a worker for the Bridge Company that had been incorporated to build what was then being called the New York and Brooklyn Bridge.

There were no towers or cables to be seen then. Big Bill admitted that he had lied through his teeth when he applied—saying that he was twenty-one years old, saying that he was a skilled worker (his only job in the Old Country, wherever that was, had been as a herder of goats for a crippled uncle), and—most important—saying that he had advanced skills as a powderman. (In truth, he had never lit a fuse attached to anything more powerful than a Roman candle, but there were other powdermen being hired that hot day in May, and Big Bill knew that he could learn from them if necessary. It turned out that most of them were lying about their skills as much as or more than Big Bill was.)

In 1870, as Big Bill said more than a few times down in the stinking black confines of the Holy Terror more than thirty years later, one had to have some real imagination to see the New York and Brooklyn Bridge. All that existed when Big Bill went to work was a huge caisson that had been launched like a ship, floated down the East River to its position near the Brooklyn shore, and deliberately sunk. That caisson, filled with compressed air to keep the river out and the men working inside alive, was going to be the foundation for the huge Brooklyn-side tower built on it and above it. But first the caisson—and then its near twin for the New York side—had to be sunk down through the river, mud, ooze, sand, gravel, and stone until it was on bedrock.

Big Bill loved numbers. (Paha Sapa had often thought that if the giant blasting expert had stayed in his Old Country and somehow gotten an education, he might have become a mathematician.) Even their first year together, Big Bill never tired of shouting the statistics at his thirty-seven-year-old assistant (the Indian widower working down there to make money to feed his five-year-old son, who was being watched days and night shifts by Crazy Maria, Keystone’s all-purpose Mexican woman).

The caisson young Big Bill had worked in under the East River was a giant rectangular box, 168 feet long and 102 feet wide, divided into six separate chambers each 28 feet long by 102 feet wide. Both caissons, Big Bill said often, “were big enough to hold four tennis courts inside,” which had amused Paha Sapa as he ate his lunch down there in the stinking gloom of the Holy Terror, since
he
had never seen a tennis court and he was damn sure Big Bill hadn’t either.

There was no bottom to the caisson box, of course. The men walked and worked directly on the mud, silt, sewage, boulders, gravel, and bedrock at the bottom of the river. And it was the presence of these boulders around the descending edges of the caisson—the box was built to descend until it could go no farther and then the building of the towers
on it
would begin—that brought in Big Bill’s fictional specialty of dynamiting.